PQ, immersed in Finnegans Wake, discusses a passage that refers to chess and detects a possible reference to Marcel Duchamp's famous painting, "Nude Descending a Staircase." He finds links from chess to Aleister Crowley and to Robert Anton Wilson:
It was The Rza, Abbott of the Wu-Tang Clan who first taught me about the depth of chess, pointing out (among other things) the importance of the number 64, there being 64 squares on a chess board as well as 64 different possible combinations of pieces that make up DNA, 64 hexagrams in the I-Ching and a few other such examples. Robert Anton Wilson discusses all of this in connection with Finnegans Wake in his spectacular book Coincidance (he's also got a short essay on chess in The Illuminati Papers that will make your head explode; and in another piece discusses it all in regards to the Law of Octaves).
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